[Sidenote:  How city government comes to be a mystery.] This long list may serve to give some idea of the mere quantity of administrative work required in a large city.  Obviously under such circumstances city government must become more or less of a mystery to the great mass of citizens.  They cannot watch its operations as the inhabitants of a small village can watch the proceedings of their township and county governments.  Much work must go on which cannot even be intelligently criticised without such special knowledge as it would be idle to expect in the average voter, or perhaps in any voter.  It becomes exceedingly difficult for the taxpayer to understand just what his money goes for, or how far the city expenses might reasonably be reduced; and it becomes correspondingly easy for municipal corruption to start and acquire a considerable headway before it can be detected and checked.

[Sidenote:  In some respects it is more of a mystery that state and national government.] In some respects city government is harder to watch intelligently than the government of the state or of the nation.  For these wider governments are to some extent limited to work of general supervision.  As compared with the city, they are more concerned with the establishment and enforcement of certain general principles, and less with the administration of endlessly complicated details.  I do not mean to be understood as saying that there is not plenty of intricate detail about state and national governments.  I am only comparing one thing with another, and it seems to me that one chief difficulty with city government is the bewildering vastness and multifariousness of the details with which it is concerned.  The modern city has come to be a huge corporation for carrying on a huge business with many branches, most of which call for special aptitude and training.

[Sidenote:  The mayor at first had too little power.] As these points have gradually forced themselves upon public attention there has been a tendency in many of our large cities toward remodeling their governments on new principles.  The most noticeable feature of this tendency is the increase in the powers of the mayor.

A hundred years ago our legislators and constitution-makers were much afraid of what was called the “one-man power.”  In nearly all the colonies a chronic quarrel had been kept up between the governors appointed by the king and the legislators elected by the people, and this had made the “one-man power” very unpopular.  Besides, it was something that had been unpopular in ancient Greece and Rome, and it was thought to be essentially unrepublican in principle.  Accordingly our great grandfathers preferred to entrust executive powers to committees rather than to single individuals; and when they assigned an important office to an individual they usually took pains to curtail its power and influence.  This disposition was visible in our early attempts to organize city governments